Terror is stalking our streets, but it has NOTHING to do with ISIS
ACRAZY man kills innocent people and within minutes everyone, from Scotland Yard to the BBC, is saying it is Islamist terror. But is this true? Please explain to me, if you can, how the actions of Usman Khan could possibly have advanced any cause. His victims were gentle academic people of the sort who tend to play down warnings that Islam is dangerous to our society. By killing them he did not make Islamic rule more likely. On the contrary, by evoking the disgust and pity of millions, he made life harder for his fellow Muslims, not least the peaceful ones who do not share his anger.
I prefer to think about things rather than rush into judgment about them. I read very carefully all the accounts of Khan’s miserable life and death. His original terror conviction was, in fact, based on some very stupid and nasty things he had said or discussed. He had not killed anyone or built a bomb.
It seems very clear he was deliberately seeking to be shot by police. Just before he went crazy with knives, he is alleged to have shouted he had a bomb, when he did not. Two separate witnesses of his last moments, who watched the awful scene from buses on London Bridge, recounted that he pulled his coat back to reveal what looked like a suicide belt, so leaving police with no real choice but to kill him in case it was real.
But what had turned him from a fairly normal schoolboy into the bloodthirsty braggart who was sent to prison? And then into an unhinged person who murSINCE dered benevolent strangers and contrived to get the police to shoot him dead? I looked for the usual explanation, and found it. I found it in a throwaway line that the writer of the article had not thought especially important. After dropping out of school, Khan ‘started hanging around with drug gangs’.
Somehow, I suspect this involved consuming the product. And I would be amazed if the product was not marijuana – whose use is increasingly associated with severe mental illness and violent crime.
As in so many of these stories, if you read a long way down, this was when his personality changed.
THE previous wimp and bully’s victim was now a death-and-glory preacher. A former classmate ‘could not believe the change in Khan when he saw him preaching on the streets’. I have looked into the background of almost every mass killer in the USA, Japan, France and Britain in recent years. It is astonishing how many of them turn out to be abusers of marijuana.
Quite a lot of crazy people – the Leytonstone knifeman, Muhaydin Mire, is an example of this – latch on to religious or political causes to make themselves feel more important and less lonely.
Mire was an undoubted marijuana user. He was so off his head that he genuinely believed that Anthony Blair was his guardian angel. His family had repeatedly begged the authorities to take him into some sort of care.
But those authorities did nothing, as they often do nothing about the severely mentally ill. He had to stab someone, and shout some meaningless political slogan, before they acted. And then they ridiculously pretended he was a terrorist.
Alas, there are alarming numbers of people on the streets of this country now, out of their minds thanks to supposedly ‘soft’ marijuana, who will not be locked up until it is too late. Most of these cases barely rate a mention, outside local papers. But when they can be categorised as ‘Islamist terror’, they barge their way on to front pages and news bulletins. And we then totally miss the point of them. The real terror in this country today is marijuana, an illegal drug the police have stopped even trying to control, with terrible effects on increasing numbers of its users. This will become appallingly clear in the years to come.
The question is, will it become clear in time to prevent the legalisation of this drug, now sought by one of the greediest, richest and most cynical lobbies in human history?
NO, I won’t weep for the apostrophe, now obviously doomed. I can usually cope with it, but it’s clear that most people can’t, and hateful predictive text often shoves it in where it’s not wanted. It’s hard to make a stand for this squiggle, mainly because there’s no firm rule about it. In my childhood, Alice In Wonderland said ‘sha’n’t’ with two apostrophes. Now she says ‘shan’t’ with one apostrophe. Why? Either it’s vital, or it isn’t.